The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  It washed him again, an invisible tide that overturned all things that lay in its path. He knelt on the deck to steady himself as the lantern swayed, back and forth, back and forth

  and he is walking down through the camp where the Lions, still jumpy from their dawn encounter with the shades of the Lost Ones, have come to find entertainment among the whores. Lamp oil burns aplenty tonight; lanterns seemingly as numerous as the stars sway from branches. He smells venison roasting.

  There, beside the fire where a raggedly-dressed boy turns a haunch of venison on a spit, he sees Hathumod holding what must be her only possession: a battered and smudged copy of the Holy Verses. Folk have gathered at the fire, mostly beggars and hangers-on but a few Lions also, but he is alert tonight, he knows the tide is turning and that anything might happen. Because he is alert he sees them coming, Lord Dietrich and his two cronies, big, broad bodies pushing arrogantly through the crowd as they make their way toward their prey and then, abruptly, sit down at the front, taking precedence over the others.

  He moves forward quickly. “Are they bothering you?” he asks her, catching Hathumod by the sleeve before she can step forward into the firelight.

  “Nay, my lord,” she says, and her surprise is the surprise of the guileless child who is asked if she has ever laid an offering before her grandmother’s gods. “They’ve done as you said. They’ve chosen their place. They’ve come to hear the teaching.”

  2

  IN the evening light, the stones looked like shrouded clerics standing watchfully at the top of the slope. Waiting for what? Since the fiasco at the old cottage, she and Sanglant had searched many times among the boulders in the high meadow but had found no path. Jerna still nursed Blessing, but her voice was gone; stolen, perhaps, or closed off by Anne’s magic, who had used the daimone to lure Sanglant away and then made sure she could not be used in that way again.

  As Liath waited for the first stars to wink into life above, she spun through her fingers the gold feather she had received from the old Aoi sorcerer. There was a secret hidden in the stones, and it was being concealed from her by the very people who claimed to be her teachers: everything was shrouded, not just the stones. She hugged the sleeping Blessing against her chest, kissed her black hair. Her little soft, round body was easy to hold and easy to cradle. She had a habit of sucking on two fingers as she drowsed off. Now, fast asleep, her tiny mouth had relaxed enough that the equally tiny and perfect and somewhat chubby little fingers lay tucked between her cheek and Liath’s shoulder.

  Her braid stirred. Wisps of loose hair fluttered on her neck. Was that a rising breeze, or the touch of one of the servants? Had Jerna followed her? She didn’t look.

  The stone crown at Verna was not a true circle but rather more of a slightly flattened oval. That it drew in the power of the rising and setting stars, the angles of the planets each to the other as they traveled through the ecliptic, seemed obvious to her: that was the art of the mathematici. At first she had examined the circle from within, standing at the central stone and sighting outward, but no reasonable line of sight presented itself. It seemed impossible to weave the alignments of the stars from inside the circle, like trying to draw the shuttle through the warp when you yourself were within the loom and the threads, not standing outside it.

  That observation, of course, had made all the difference.

  She heard footsteps and now she did turn, tucking the feather between tunic and breast so it lay concealed.

  He had his tunic off his shoulders, gathered by his belt at his hips so that his chest and back were bare. With his ax balanced along his shoulders, he looked a tempting sight. He swung down the ax, kissed her, then the baby, then pressed against her as if to kiss her again. The sheen of sweat on his body must have been cooling rapidly as the night breeze rose; surely he was cold, or perhaps he just didn’t notice. She was trembling, but not from cold. She touched a finger to his lips and just so slightly pushed him back.

  “Ai, God,” he said, sounding frustrated.

  Yet surely he was no more frustrated than she was. They had already done things they ought not to have done, not with the situation as desperate as it was. She could not risk getting pregnant again, not now.

  “This isn’t a natural platform,” she said, indicating the level ground beneath her feet. She stood downslope from the stones, which from this angle lay to the west. From this angle, she looked up at the stone crown. “From this angle, the stones become the loom and I become the weaver. Before it didn’t make sense that the stones weren’t a true circle, but look—” She tucked Blessing more tightly into the crook of her left arm and, pulling the gold feather out again, used it to point. “Because of the flattened circle, those two stones, the left edge of the nearer one and the right edge of the farther one, make a line of sight that lines up with that notch in the ridge. There. Do you see it?”

  He was silent for a long time. Then he moved up behind her onto the level shelf of ground, which was not more than two strides square. He was careful not to touch her, but she felt him nevertheless. He might as well have been making love with her, his presence lay so heavily on her, but that was her own desire speaking through her body. He understood the risks, too. He was the one who, when she had finally recovered her strength, had pointed out that a second pregnancy and labor might be as debilitating as the first and that to be completely sure that she was strong enough to escape at a moment’s notice, they must make sure she did not get pregnant.

  At moments like this, she wondered if it were a sin to hate the woman who had brought her here and thrown her in a cage only slightly less repressive than the one Hugh had shut her in. Yet was it truly less confining just because the hand that held her had a softer touch?

  “They betrayed me,” she went on, lowering her voice, knowing that the servants could be anywhere, could be listening and would be listening. There were no secrets in this valley from the one who ruled over it. But she went on anyway because anger left burning inside will only blacken the heart. “I thought this would be a place where I could study in peace, but it isn’t true. I’m nothing but a tool to them. Now I learn that my own mother has tried to kill you, and I can’t trust any of them with Blessing, because they might try to kill her as well. I can’t trust any of them at all. They all lied to me.”

  “I lied to you, too. I didn’t tell you what I suspected and later knew.”

  “Nay.” She shook her head emphatically. “You can’t compare yourself to them. You did it to protect me. You waited until I was strong enough to act. I don’t doubt you meant it for the best.” She tried to be better than she was, but she couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. Then she laughed bitterly. “Surrounded on all sides by villains. Even the trees might hear our whispers and give away our secrets.”

  Because he stood behind her, she couldn’t see his expression but she felt him shift and God help her she almost turned at that moment; she wanted to set down the baby and have done with caution. But she could not. As Sanglant had so bluntly phrased it, a second pregnancy might kill her.

  “I do see it,” he said suddenly, then added, “the line of sight.”

  It was a timely reprieve. “A star should rise in that notch. If I’m right, then its thread of starlight brings the crown to life. Once the magic is alive within the stones, then the other stars and planets, and the moon, can be woven into the crown so that it makes—well, I don’t know. It’s the gateway we came through to get here. It’s a way of moving from one crown to another.”

  “Then if you can weave the starlight through this crown, we can leave. Can’t we?”

  She smiled wryly. “It’s never that simple, is it? First of all, this crown is limited because the mountains cut off the horizon. There’s a narrower band of sky than there would be on a plain, or on a hill, for instance. Second of all, I don’t know how old these stones are. They might have been raised in the last twenty years. They might be perfectly aligned to the stars as we now see them. But
if they were constructed by the Aoi, if they’re that old, then because of the precession of the equinoxes it would have been other stars rising at that notch at this day and time of year, other threads of light laying the weft into the shed than the ones that rise in these days at this time. The stars change more than the mountains do.”

  He was shaking his head again, fiddling with the ax as he did when he grew impatient with her explanations. Maybe battle seemed more straightforward than astronomy. “But you said they’re fixed stars—”

  “Nay, nay,” she said, chuckling. Hadn’t she explained this before? “They’re fixed in relationship to each other. But, for instance, look there—” Standing to the west of the stone crown they gazed east, of course, and along the eastern ridge a few faint stars could now be seen blooming as twilight faded to dusk. Again she used the feather to point. “That’s the Penitent rising in the east. In truth, a bit to the northeast. There aren’t any really bright stars rising at this time of night, this time of year, but the Crown of Stars—you know, the little cluster of seven stars—will rise later, although I don’t think it will rise, just there, in the notch.” He said nothing, just set the ax down with a thud. He seemed discontent, with life, with imprisonment, with her answer. She pointed overhead. “See there, above us. The summer evening sky is the Queen’s sky. There she rides, and there are her Staff and Sword and Crown. And those three bright stars—”

  “Are the Sapphire, the Diamond, and the Citrine. I remember that much.”

  “But because the wheel of the heavens slips backward bit by bit over the years, if we had stood here in the time of the Aoi two thousand and more years ago, the summer evening sky would have been—Well.”

  She had to think about it. Blessing stirred, fussing in her arms, and she rocked from side to side as she calculated.

  She had worked so hard to regain her strength in these two months after the shock of Heribert’s escape and the sudden bald revelation that Anne wanted to kill Sanglant and even Blessing. The magi claimed that Liath was not their prisoner but rather their colleague, but that was, as the old Dariyan orators might have said, just splitting hairs. They had stolen from her the one thing she had come here for: to learn unencumbered by anything but pure knowledge. They didn’t truly care about pure knowledge at all, that was the frightening thing. It was war. Sanglant had said so, and he was right. He knew war when he saw it.

  And yet, if it wasn’t for their hatred of Sanglant, might she not have joined willingly in their cause? If the Aoi return would cause a cataclysm that would rip apart the Earth, if sea became the mountains and the mountains became the sea, then wasn’t it right to stop the Aoi before they wreaked such monumental destruction?

  They might be wrong about Sanglant and right about the obligation laid upon them.

  But how could she know?

  “The Sisters,” she said as the wheel of the heavens shifted in her mind’s eye, turning through the centuries. For this alone she loved the stars: They were eternal and silent, uninvolved in the tide of conflict that continually racked the earth. “I think the Sisters would have been rising, and the Guivre would have been at zenith. Different stars would have different influence. If it’s true the Aoi built these stone crowns as a loom for magic, then the threads they were using would have been entirely different in each season than the threads made by the stars today.”

  “But the Sisters still rise more or less in the same position, don’t they?” he objected. “Just at a different time of year. Or a different time of night.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. All things change over time, even the heavens, but unless we had an unbroken chain of recorded observations reaching from their time into ours, we can only trust what we see with our own eyes. The rest is computation.”

  “And it’s all very interesting, I’m sure,” he replied, a little exasperated, “but can you open a gate in the stones or not?”

  “Ai,” she said on a sigh. “It should be possible. But I wouldn’t know where we’d end up. There had to be some system to the placement of the crowns. I’ve seen more than two dozen with my own eyes, scattered all over these lands, as far north as Heyetrop and as far south as the deserts west of Kartiako. I’ve heard of more. The Lion’s Claw woven at rising in spring might take you to one place, and the Lion’s Claw woven at setting in winter might take you somewhere else. Did you know there’s another shelf like to this one on the other side of the crown? So that you can sight into the west, to the setting of the stars.”

  “And north and south as well, I suppose.”

  “No, stars don’t rise and set to the north and south, but it’s probable that here or at other crowns you could, say, measure the southern limits of moonrise and moonset. The moon has a cycle of a little over eighteen years according to—”

  “Liath, I beg you. Listen to what I’m saying. Does it matter where we end up as long as we’re free?”

  She brushed Blessing’s hair with her lips. The baby had such a clean smell, fresh and warm. She was an astonishing gift to come from the simple act of two bodies joining, a blessing indeed. Sanglant set a hand on Liath’s shoulder and caressed her neck with a thumb.

  “I brought something for you,” he said. “You wouldn’t wear it before. You said it was wrong for you to wear it, but I knew it was meant for you. I knew it was meant for you long before I understood why.”

  “What if she’s lying?” said Liath as she touched her own throat. But he was already moving to slip the gold torque of royal kinship around her neck. It felt like a slave’s collar, as heavy as anything Hugh had ever bound her with.

  “Of course she’s Taillefer’s granddaughter. She isn’t lying, Liath, and you don’t truly believe she is.”

  “I saw his tomb at the chapel in Autun,” she said softly. “I prayed there with my father, once. I remember staring at his effigy and wondering how craftsmen could render any face so perfectly in stone. Da was weeping. I don’t know why. I suppose I’ll never know why. He holds a seven-pointed crown in his hand. The cleric in attendance said it was the emperor’s crown, the one he wore when he went abroad in his royal dignity, and that each gem represented one of the wandering stars. It marked his right to rule, that Emperor Taillefer ruled Earth just as God ruled in the heavens, that he had their imprimatur. But Da said that the crown was a funeral gift from Biscop Tallia, Taillefer’s favorite daughter. He said that she meant it to represent the seven spheres that the emperor’s soul would have to traverse to reach the Chamber of Light.”

  The torque weighed hard on her neck. The two gold knobs dug into her collarbone. It still didn’t feel right. “It’s strange. I remember text so easily. But faces don’t always stay clear in my mind. When I think back, I just can’t see his carved face clearly enough to know if I resemble him.”

  She gave in to it then, leaned back against him, and let him put his arms around her and the baby. They stood there for a long time, watching the stars.

  3

  WANDERING down the path of doubt was a slippery slope that always ended in the mire. Antonia, formerly Biscop of Mainni and now masquerading under the name Sister Venia where she lived among a nest of mathematici, had no inclination to be trapped in the mud.

  They hadn’t wanted Heribert among them all along, although his manners and elegant bearing—if a little smirched by his months attending the dog-prince—were certainly the jewel of this altogether detestable place. Although she shuddered to contemplate it, the hall he had crafted with his hands and the aid of the servants and Prince Sanglant was such a vast improvement over the decrepit tower that had been the main building when they had arrived that she could not understand why they were so eager to rid themselves of him, since he alone had made of this valley a fitting residence for noble persons of their rank and accomplishment.

  Or perhaps they hadn’t cared about him one way or the other. Like the savage Eika dog they’d killed to get to the baby, he had just been in the way at the wrong time.

 
So she had listened to the various explanations, none proffered with as much self-righteous anger as that of the prince, who truly was not able to temper his emotions. Perhaps it was true that Sister Anne’s cool recital ought to have carried more weight. Reason always triumphed over base emotion.

  But Prince Sanglant had recklessly told her other things as well, and rather than doubt she had decided that perhaps she didn’t really support the goals of the Seven Sleepers. Perhaps she didn’t see any need to save earth from the disaster that, they claimed, would soon be visited upon it.

  After all, why shouldn’t the world suffer in a cataclysm brought on by the Lost Ones? There were wicked in plenty, and God had never before shied away from punishment. If some innocents died together with the damned, then so be it: They would die secure in the knowledge that death was only a passageway leading to the blessed Chamber of Light, where they would reside for eternity in the peace of God’s all encompassing light.

  Perhaps Heribert was better off out in the world, as long as he had the protection of someone more powerful than himself. Perhaps she had learned as much as it was worth learning, here at Verna. Perhaps it was time for her to venture back into the world and see what she could make of it, now that she had mastered so many new skills.

  She knelt at the altar, a simple wooden box carved out of cherrywood and polished to a handsome sheen. Over Severus’ protests, Heribert had added various ornaments, grape leaves signifying God’s bounty at every corner and edge and elaborate roses, for purity, on each side. She liked to admire them as she prayed, because they reminded her that God didn’t condemn luxury, the little fine details that made life more elegant, but rather luxuria, the wanton desire for carnal and earthly things.

  “‘Open to me the gates of victory,’” she prayed. “‘In Your service I have suffered reproach. I pray you then, redeem me, and rebuke my enemies.’”